


against the darkness

by anabel



Category: Chess (Board Game)
Genre: Character Death (offscreen), F/F, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-13
Updated: 2013-11-13
Packaged: 2018-01-01 10:09:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1043568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anabel/pseuds/anabel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had been a long, cold war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	against the darkness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Malkontent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Malkontent/gifts).



It had been a long, cold night, the latest in a long, cold war, and when the knight swung down from her saddle in the darkened courtyard, she had to suppress a shiver. Upstairs there was a single candle burning in the window; down here in the courtyard there was only her, and her horse, and the wind whistling through the trees.

The bishop was in the hall as the knight went in, the long ecclesiastical robes swirling somberly around her. Somehow the effect wasn’t as awe-inspiring as it had been before the war, when the knight might have cast her eyes down in respect. Now she met the bishop’s eyes and smiled grimly. “News?”

“The front is holding,” the bishop said. Her fingers were folded properly in front of her, echoing old traditions, but they twitched. _For now_ , the knight could hear, the unspoken refrain the same as the wind in the trees. _For now._

Last week they had lost the knight’s partner. Ten years they’d roamed the kingdom together, slaying dragons and righting wrongs and judging small disputes. Ten years, and the knight had known her partner’s habits, foibles, idiosyncrasies as well as her own. And then the war had begun, and they had been split up, sent to rally the borders and harass the enemy’s flanks.

The knight wondered if her partner had laughed when the enemy forces had cornered her in a field; she had always used to laugh at everything, the merriest woman the knight had ever known, and it would have seemed fitting, somehow, if she had laughed defiantly until the end. The knight wondered if her partner’s husband and child had heard of her death – wondered if her horse had been killed with her, or if it had been taken as war spoil and was paddocked somewhere, longing confusedly for the laughing woman who had fed it carrots and sugar lumps.

“Her majesty is upstairs,” the bishop said, her face suddenly looking very young. Had she been a bishop before the war, or had she been pressed into service before her time, thrust willy-nilly into oversized robes and an oversized task? The knight couldn’t remember. It had been a long, cold winter.

She climbed the stairs slowly, her sword hitting the side of her leg in the confined space. Perhaps she should adjust her swordbelt, but the feeling grounded her somehow; she liked the firm reminder of her weapon near to hand.

In the candlelit room, her queen stood silhouetted against the window, looking out across the darkness of her embattled kingdom.

“Majesty,” the knight said, her voice scratching.

It had been six months since the knight had last seen her queen. They had been deep in enemy territory, fiercely celebrating in the ruins of an enemy keep. They had chopped an altar screen from the heathen chapel for firewood, and roasted fish from the river over its crackling heat. The knight had burned her fingers in her impatience – she had been ravenous, all the fear and tension of battle leaking out of her at once and leaving an enormous hole in her stomach – and her queen had smiled, and kissed her burnt fingers, and then her mouth. 

But that had been when they had been winning. 

All that glorious summer they had ridden together, striking fear into the hearts of their enemies, threatening their keeps and their churches, bringing down their armies of common folk. In the evening they had pored over maps together, planning strategies and trying to anticipate enemy movements. In the night they had kept warm; the knight had never felt closer to home, deep in the territory of her enemies, than when she had held her queen against her breast.

“You’re late,” her queen said now, still looking out into the darkness.

The knight crossed the room to stand behind her. “There were some minor difficulties.” Peasants, armed with little more than numbers, rocks, and one wicked long whip. En masse they could be tricky, but the knight was more than a match for a ragged band of peasants. _For now._

Her queen didn’t ask for details, but the knight hadn’t expected her to. They had been lovers for only that one sunlit summer, but friends since girlhood. If anyone knew the knight’s capabilities, it was the woman by the window, her dark hair out of its regal plaits and streaming unbound down her back, her shoulders braced as if against a northeasterly wind. She would trust the knight to report anything she needed to know.

“Is it that bad?” the knight asked, quietly, permitting herself the informality. She felt, somehow, as if her queen needed this, here and now. Perhaps it was why she had been sent for, leaving the front line for a night and riding as fast as she dared through the war-torn countryside, passing the ruins of once-prosperous farms. To give her queen what the young frightened bishop downstairs never could, free and honest counsel.

“Yes,” her queen said, turning from the window at last. The candlelight flattered her, and the knight had always thought her one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen, but now even the knight could see the tired lines of her face and the exhaustion in her eyes. “It is exactly that bad.”

For a moment all the knight wanted was to step forward and take her queen in her arms, to whisper soft nothings into her ear and make her forget for one moment the dread marshalling of the enemy forces. 

But that was not who they were, and there was no time. She settled for reaching out to touch her queen’s hand, and found shivering fingers twining into hers with an iron grip. “Tell me.”

Her queen breathed, nostrils flaring, and perhaps their hands clasped fiercely between them settled her as firmly as the closer embrace might have. “She’s riding to the capital. He won’t be able to fight her off, you know him. We’re lost if she takes the keep.”

The knight did know the king, a shy young man whose talents lay in music and dance. In happier times, his rich bass voice and his nimble fingers on the viol had set the whole keep to dancing; she had caught up her best friend and whirled about the dance floor, giggling and blithe, swordbelt banging her leg, trying not to trip over her friend’s voluminous skirts. But that had been before the king’s elder sister died, the shy young prince becoming overnight a king, and in need of a queen.

She hadn’t resented them. Her friend had been the most capable, the most sensible, the most practical choice the new king could have made. And they had been fond of each other, or as fond as two people marrying for the sake of a country could be. There had been no children, but ten years of peace and prosperity.

And then two years of war.

“Maybe we underestimate him,” she tried, for the sake of the fingers clutched in hers. “Perhaps he’ll prove his best in a crisis.”

Her queen shook her head. The pearl drops in her ears (the last of the royal jewels, all the others long sold) caught the light, and somehow made the knight’s eyes prickle. “Even if he proved a hero under fire, it wouldn’t be enough against her.”

Mageborn, ferocious, absolutely fearless; the knight knew everything they said about the White Queen. It was said that she flew through the air, swooping in on an enemy’s battlements from above. It was said that she could ride faster than a dragon’s breath, striking death into the center of an army’s ranks before anyone knew she was close. It was said that she wasn’t entirely human.

The queen went on, her face set, and the knight realized with a start that whatever decision had to be made, her queen had already made it. She had thought that she’d been summoned to help, but this was something else. “No, he’ll never be a match for her. There’s only two people in the kingdom who might be a match for her.”

She didn’t mean the bishop downstairs. “Us.”

Her queen nodded, and tried to smile, brave and wan. “I ride tonight.”

Surely – “We ride tonight,” the knight corrected, forgetting that she was correcting her queen, forgetting everything except that the woman she loved was going into battle against the doughtiest warrior to ride the Western Plains, and the knight’s place was at her side.

Her queen raised her free hand to rest it on the knight’s cheek. Her sword-calluses were rough, but the knight turned her face to kiss her queen’s fingers, much as the queen had kissed her burnt ones once upon a summer’s afternoon. 

“No,” the queen said, softly, and the candlelight flickered across her face. “Her bishop has followed a day’s ride behind her.”

The knight swallowed. The enemy bishop was only slightly less feared than his queen. His magic was a terrible thing to behold; he had killed whole regiments of their people, and burnt a stronghold to the ground with one bolt of conjured lightning. If he had ridden into their land again, he must be found and destroyed before he laid waste to the entire countryside, and the knight was the one to do it. She could hide, she could dodge, she had ten years of experience in this terrain. She could come at him in ways he wouldn’t expect or be able to counter; she could sneak up and come at him from behind. There was a chance – a bare chance, but a chance.

But if she went after the bishop, she couldn’t go with her queen.

“Must you face her alone?” she asked, her lips whispering across her queen’s fingertips.

Her queen shrugged, the movement a ghost of girlhood, when careless shrugs and peals of laughter were everyday fare between swordplay and dances and history lessons. “I’ll take my own bishop.” She must have seen the look on the knight’s face. “This is something I have to do. It comes down to us, her and me. I won’t let her have my kingdom.”

“You could have sent a rider to me to tell me about the bishop,” the knight said, huskily.

The queen’s eyes glittered as she looked up; no doubt it was the candlelight. “Perhaps I wanted to tell you myself.”

These would be their finest and most desperate battles. The knight knew too much to have any great hope that they would meet again; surely one or both of them must fall in the attempt. She was suddenly fiercely glad that her queen had sent for her.

Her queen came quietly into her arms, and the knight shut her eyes against the darkness.

~

“What do we do now?” the king asked, coming to stand beside her on the battlement.

The knight looked out over the kingdom. As the sunrise washed over the hills, she could see how scarred it was; burned farmhouses, ruined castles, a collapsed steeple. Two years of war had cut deep.

She couldn’t look down at the courtyard below her. Not yet.

In the chapel, the bishop was starting the funerary rituals. 

“We’ve lost our queen,” the knight said, and didn’t even try to disguise the quiver in her voice. The king would understand, and if he didn’t, she didn’t give a damn. “They’ve lost both their queen and their bishop.”

“I know the body count,” the king said, and when she looked at him, his face was set. There were lines there that she didn’t remember from the old dancing days. “What’s the plan?”

“Bring the war back to _them_ ,” the knight said, her hands aching where they gripped the battlement wall. She remembered laughter and joy and roasted fish and burnt fingers and her queen’s smiles, all in the enemy’s territory, all feeling so long ago now. 

“Take the bishop with you,” the king said, staring at the horizon. 

The knight opened her mouth to demur, but changed her mind. Two were better than one, even if the bishop could never replace even her knight-partner, let alone her queen.

The widower-king’s face was set. “She’s young, but we were all young once.”

Once.

“We’ll strike far and strike fast,” the knight said, grimly. “They’ll never know what’s coming.”

On the altar in the courtyard, someone scattered the first spring flowers over the bier.

~


End file.
